Thursday, September 04, 2008

The Total Politics Top 100 UK Political Blogs

You will be relieved to hear that this is the final blogging list. More than 1,140 of you voted in the poll and more than 75 blogs encouraged their readers to take part. This is not a scientific poll, and has never pretended to be, but because of the number of people taking part and the number of blogs promoting it, it is certainly more representative this year than in 2007 and 2006.

The voting system used to compile this list was simple. Bloggers and blog readers were asked to rank their top ten blogs and then email them to Total Politics. The results were then fed into a spreadsheet, with the top blog getting ten points, the second blog nine points, and so on. In total, people voted for more than 590 different blogs. I only list the Top 100 here, but the Top 200 will be printed in the book (published tomorrow) which you can buy HERE. You will also be able to download it as a free pdf from the Total Politics website from next week.

All the lists contained in the rest of the book are also compiled directly from this main list. So for the first time each list I have published in the last two weeks and featured in the book has been voted or by the public, rather than compiled by an expert panel of bloggers.

• Out of the Top 100, 48 blogs are on the right and 30 are on the left.• The Top 100 features 27 Conservative blogs, 16 Labour and 10 LibDem• The Top 200 features 37 Conservative blogs, 33 Labour and 21 LibDem• The Top 500 features 105 Conservative blogs, 74 Labour and 56 LibDem• Of the Top 500, 170 are on the right and 268 on the left• 44 out of the Top 100 were not in last year’s Top 100.

Similar to last year, right of centre blogs still dominate the upper reaches of the chart. Last year I predicted that three or four left of centre blogs would challenge at the top. That hasn’t quite happened, although Tom Harris MP and Hopi Sen may well do so in the next twelve months. The left of centre group blog Liberal Conspiracy is also set to break into the top 20 and has grown in popularity in a very short time.

Voting this year appeared to come from a much wider range of bloggers than before, mainly because around 75 different blogs advertised the vote on their sites. Liberal Conspiracy encouraged a boycott of the whole exercise as they felt that because it was being organized by someone on the right, right wing bloggers would be the only beneficiaries. The boycott was boycotted by most blogs on the left, and for good reason if you look at the fact that there are now far more left of centre blogs in the Top 500 than right of centre ones – 268 to 170. The challenge now for those blogs is to turn their numerical superiority into extra readers who stick with them.

Up to now, I have been relatively dismissive of left of centre blogs as I felt they tended to very insular and only spoke to themselves. Successful blogs tend to attract readers from all over the political spectrum, and are not just echo chambers. At least, that’s one definition of success. Blogs like Hopi Sen and the LibDem People’s Republic of Mortimer have risen high in the chart because they were very well written, at times quite humorous, but also provide an insight for outsiders to the way their political mindset works.

It has been hugely disappointing that the last twelve months has seen no rise in the number of blogging MPs. The only notable arrival is Labour Minister Tom Harris. Our politicians seem to love reading blogs but fear writing them. Perhaps that will never change, but those who fear blogging should look at the example of John Redwood whose blog has become required reading for anyone interested in economic policy. But not only is he attracting regular readers on the right, he’s also getting the media reading his blog, and people on the left.

The main blogs have all experienced a continuing rise is readers. This year has seen huge controversies in the blogging world about the way in which blog statistics are counted. Most bloggers now use Google Analytics to count their readers, with Absolute Unique Visitors as the yardstick by which blogs are judged. Newspaper websites still use pageviews as their method of counting readers.

Guido Fawkes became the first blogger to reach 100,000 absolute unique visitors in any one month, with my blog reaching 70,000. But you don’t have to go much further down the Top 10 to find blogs which struggle to reach 20,000. PoliticalBetting has never published its absolute unique visitor count but boasts of being the most popular blog in the country by virtue of the fact that it has more than 1 million pageviews a month. What it doesn’t tell you is that many of its readers spend all evening on the site hitting refresh.

An interesting move in the last few months was the purchase by the New Statesman of LabourHome. They apparently paid more than £50,000, which for a blog which attracts a relatively small readership was quire some feat for its owners Alex Hilton and Jag Singh. It has struggled to emulate its Conservative equivalent because it has never had a full time editor. Guido Fawkes reckoned his site was now worth in excess of £1 million based on the valuation of LabourHome, but he misses an important point. Single person blogs are valueless to an outside buyer without the person who made the blog successful in the first place. They can only ever gain any value by moving within the ambit of the mainstream media.

What will the next twelve months bring? Here are seven predictions…

• Labour blogs will become more prominent as the media seeks controversial views on the Labour leadership• The MSM will make further efforts to lure several of the more well known bloggers to blog for them• LibDem Voice will receive a cash injection similar to LabourHome from a rich LibDem donor• One big blogger will shock the blogging world by giving up• Liberal Conspiracy will make headway in the next twelve months and double its readership• ConservativeHome will undergo a transformation with Tim Montgomerie concentrating on other projects and Jonathan Isaby giving the site a makeover• Blog readership will increase by 50%

So, here, at long last is the Top 100... Remember, it's not meant to be scientific, and has never pretended to be!Last year's position is in brackets.You can see positions 200-101 on the Total Politics Campaigns Blog HERE.

If your blog features in this list, or any of the others, click HERE to get a sidebar button.

All the blog lists, along with articles by leading bloggers are published in the Guide to Political Blogging in the UK 2008-9 which is published tomorrow and will be available at all the party conferences. You can now also pre-order it via the Total Politics website for £12 inc p&p. You will receive it in mid September.

Re: 'What it doesn’t tell you is that many of its readers spend all evening on the site hitting refresh.' my imression is that many of its readers spend all the working day hitting refresh - when one imagines they should be getting on with something at least nominally useful and important to whoever pays their wages.

Off topic but of interest: Time [Sep 03: Joe Klein] on the very wonderful and fragrant Ms Palin:

' . . it is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it, pursued pork-barrel projects as mayor, tried to ban books at the local library and thinks the war in Iraq is "a task from God." The attempts by the McCain campaign to bully us into not reporting such things are not only stupidly aggressive, but unprofessional in the extreme.'

This must be a con.I can't believe the incisive ruminations of Dirty European Socialist are not in the top ten blogs. I will not believe that you have conducted this poll fairly until I see DES in the top ten.

What I do not understand is how come Nadine Dorries claims to have 700 monthly hits on her blog (re:Heartbeats posted on her blog 24/07/08)and didn't blog for 5 weeks? This figure is on par with Guildo and far in excess of your figure.For someone (who also stopped her readers comments)who in this poll came no.33 can claim far more readers than those in the no.1 and 2 positions is bewildering.

From the West Wing to West Ham, Barack Obama is in the running for two big jobs.

The Democratic presidential nominee was listed as a 10,000-1 shot to take over Premier League football club West Ham on Wednesday after a London-based businessman bet 10 pounds ($17.80) that Obama will replace Alan Curbishley as the team’s manager.

regarding your views on Liberal Conspiracy, it's biggest fault is that it is barely liberal and appears to be a Labour conspiracy to hijack the Liberal brand at a time when calling yourslf Labour is very unpopular. The word "conspiracy" really has meaning in its title as it appears to many Liberal that it is an attempt to be something it is not.

One difference between pb.com and other blogs is the quality of the comments. I read Iain's and Guido's blogs every couple of days for the quality of the blog itself, but rarely find that the Comments are worth my time. However, pb.com is readable for the quality of the discussion in the comments section. Yes the signal to noise ratio is probably only about 30-50% - but in the comments section of other blogs it is quite frankly only 1-2%. So it's a different type of blog - more like a bulletin board - which you would want to look at several times a day if interesting discussions are taking place.

Maybe it's the fact that it's a politically neutral blog that makes it so: the right wing blogs mostly have cringing sycophants and the occasional leftie troll; although pb.com is right-leaning it is run by a LibDem and there are some pro-Labour posters including at least one MP.

One can normally judge a blog's relevance or quality by comments on it. Shane Greer at 38 has a blog that nobody reads or comments on. Isn't this list just an insular list of friends talking about friends?

I think you would be crazy to pack it in. Ok so Guido took the top spot from you.. so what.. his Blog is the Sun (I like it).

You just need to up the game a bit.. stop publishing lists of stuff and posts about posts on other blogs (that's what's hurting your readership)

Do more in depth stuff, use your political network to get insightful thought provoking stuff that makes really compelling reading and retake the ground. You are in a better position as a skilled interviewer than anyone else out there.

You are a pioneer. You, more than any other blogger have been personally responsible for inspiring other bloggers and catalysing the political blogosphere in this country.

Our democracy needs this - so rebuild your belief, don't put all your eggs in the 'old media' basket and take things to the next level.

The positive point of falling off your perch is that it energizes you to get back there but with new innovation. Get on with it.

Toque, Not sure I understand what is behind your question, but it's quite clear whether most blogs are on the right or left. If we're not sure we tend to put them under Non Aligned. They are all in the Total Politics Blog Database. We have corrected any errors we have been alerted to.

Not sure if this'll reach you it being so late in the day but I was wondering why the Total Politics Top 50 blogs on your web don't agree to the Top 50 in this post. (Yes, I am unashamedly chuffed to make No. 44 which is the main reason for my flagging this.)

Maybe the 2 lists aren't supposed to correlate or maybe it's a work in progress, but I just thought I'd mention it.

There's a link on your front page "Iain Dale's Top 50 blogs". It links to here:

http://www.totalpolitics.com/politicalblogs/blogs.php?category_id=24

The 50 blogs included are not the same as the top 50 per the final results of the voting.

I have, however, just realised that this may be your own personal top 50 which I have no right to force myself onto so if that's the case then by all means, apologies for the interruption to whatever you were doing...

It’s a really boring blog and it doesn’t appear as if she has any life outside of politics which only goes to prove, as I had already thought, that most *other* bloggers are saddos or geeks with no social or personal lives at all. Christ, she still lives with her parents at 29, how sad can you get!

I’m personally only interested in blogs of people I either a) know or b) whose well-rounded lives interest me somehow.

Plus I found it really amusing and you might be interested to discover that the Lib Dems*still* spend their time talking about me and my husband when they should be electioneering - TWO AND A HALF YEARS after we left the party. Maybe that’s why they haven’t been able to win any by-elections since we left? Talk about obsessed. We’re way too busy as a working family.

You could give Alix Mortimer an award for *Bitch* of the Year instead if you like. Despite having never met me before in her life she saw it fit (as did her geeky “boyfriend) a few months ago to write a load of crap about me on the web and gave a verdict about an incident which happened before she was even a member of the Party which she therefore knows diddly squat about and still hasn’t apologised to me for it even though I pointed out that she doesn’t know me, wasn’t there at the time and therefore is in no position to comment.

I also think anyone who thinks writing “politics” as “pollyticks” or using the non-existent word “aten’t” is funny is probably more immature than my one year old daughter and that for someone who is nearly 30 she badly needs to grow up and act her age.

When the political blogging community starts recognising people with interesting lives (not sad ones) and stands up against mass cyber bullying as experienced (and still experienced) by myself and my husband (rather than jumping on the bandwagon as most of the blogging twats did) that’s when you might get more normal people tuned into political blogging. Cyber bullying, I note, is now recognised as a problem and a crime and I had to make two separate police reports against Lib Dem members during the relentless and entirely unnecessary hate campaign we suffered.

When I told my normal friends what Mortimer and her crew were still saying recently I got the response that “Those Lib Dem/bloggers SERIOUSLY need to get a life.” Yep. That is, I am afraid, what normal, non-political people like us still think of you all.

We, by the way, still get messages from people who miss our blog and enjoyed it for what it was. I expect they were probably normal people too.